To facilitate the use of Restoring Opportunity: The Crisis of Inequality and the Challenge for American Education, in teaching undergraduates or graduate students, we have created four teaching modules. One module focuses on issues related to teachers and teacher preparation, a second on school leadership, a third on education policy issues, and a fourth on the sources of growing inequalities in family incomes and educational outcomes.
Each of the four modules consists of two parts, each of which is intended to be one 90-minute class (or two classes of shorter length). Each module includes an appendix with Teaching Notes. You might choose to use all of the modules accompanying Restoring Opportunity in your classes or you might select a single lesson from this module or one of the others. However you choose to approach teaching Restoring Opportunity, we hope that these resources will be of help.
Module on Teachers and Teacher Preparation
This module invites students to explore the skills and knowledge that teachers and coaches highlighted in RO bring to and develop in their respective schools, as well as the role of teacher preparation in the 21st century. View and Download Now.
Module on School Leadership
This module focuses on the aspects of school leadership that are directly related to improving the quality, coherence, and consistency of instruction. We do so both because this is the emphasis in Restoring Opportunity and because it is the most pressing challenge facing school leaders today. View and Download Now.
Module on Education Policy
This module focuses on two important education policy questions: How to provide schools with a combination of sustained supports and sensible accountability, and how to design Pre-K programs that effectively enhance educational opportunity for students living in poverty. Unlike the previous modules in which the two classes were thematically connected and were designed to build on and flow from one to the other, the two classes in this module differ in topic and were created with the intention of having them taught as two discrete topics. View and Download Now.
Module on Growing Inequalities
This module invites students to increase their understanding of the factors that contributed to increasing inequality of family incomes over the last 40 years, and the mechanisms through which this translated into increasing inequality in educational outcomes between children from low- and upper-income families. View and Download Now.
We thank Dr. Lauren Gatti for her excellent work with the authors of Restoring Opportunity in creating the four teaching modules.